Hobby

Credit: Mr Uggla
Forget all the film school jive; first and formeost Hobby, a.k.a. Oskar Bård, is an ideas man. The 33-year-old director—repped out of Stink, @radical and his own shop Hobby Film in Sweden—says his value in the early phases of idea development more than outweighs his relative inexperience in directing, a career he launched into in 2005.

"I have another background, the creative background," he says. "I get inspiration from other things that get me thinking, boring stuff, more than films." Hobby was an art director at Stockholm's Mamne & Co. for 12 years before he started his own agency, Blond Swedish Amateurs in 2000, which perhaps explains why agencies have turned to turn to him for more than the average directorial plussing.

Swedish agency Farfar bought him onto "The Heidies," an ambitious Diesel web project in which a pair of babes clad in the brand's new intimates collections held a guy hostage in a hotel room until they achieved their "15 MB of Fame." The kidnappers and their victim, set up in a wired room with six cameras, appeared 24/7 on the Diesel website, where visitors could interact with them. Four weeks before the massive, five-day live event began, Hobby installed himself at the Farfar office to help script the project and orchestrate the online takeover, which went on to win a Cyber Grand Prix at Cannes.

Hobby worked with the creatives on a basic storyline, and a rough outline for each day's
story was put up in the bathroom of the hostage headquarters. Over the course of the "shoot," he communicated with the actors when they took toilet breaks and through SMS and e-mails, while in emergencies he'd ring the phone on set and pretend to be a hotel staffer telling them to keep the noise down. Sleep was rare—an average of two hours a night. "We worked like drowning rats," Hobby says. "It was wonderful."

But for him, it's not all supermodels in panties cavorting around hotel rooms under surveillance. Hobby's got a serious side, too, most evident in work for Anorexia Contact. In "The Mirror," out of Grey, Stockholm, a girl in her underwear checks herself out in a looking glass, squeezing her flab as tears roll down her face. The camera pulls back to reveal a skeletal frame—a long suffering anorexic was cast for the spot—revealing how psychologically unaware the girl is of her horrific skinniness.

As a director, Hobby might have found the perfect home for his idea-making. "I wanted to change the people I've worked with, and it has worked. I feel much happier when I work and have creatives as clients instead of marketing directors."